


Allegiance

by toujours_nigel



Series: girl!Boromir AU [2]
Category: The Lord of the Rings (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Magic Fingers, Past Rape/Non-con, Rape Recovery, Vaginal Fingering, girl!Boromir
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 08:32:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5960914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the close of feasting, in the halls of Meduseld, Aragorn goes to Berenel (girl!Boromir).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Allegiance

Aragorn comes to her after the sounds of feasting have died away, looks her over with a measuring eye and orders her to take the girdle from her robe. It is of a pattern old when she was a child, now positively antiquated, that is yet easier on her injuries than aught requiring her to shift her shoulders to don it. In truth the girdle sits ill on her still-tender stomach, but that injury they have held secret from Edoras: it would be poor payment indeed to pile such horrors atop their great grief, and in truth in no easier hour would she have told King Theoden of it, or little Eowyn. Theodred perhaps, but it would have been a matter of some little concern to him had he lived.

She unwraps the girdle from about her waist and drops the coils of it careless to the ground and, still with averted eyes, says, “Have they stopped singing about him yet?”

 “They have stopped singing,” Aragorn says, “and Theoden and Eowyn have retired and all the others sought what comfort they might. Does it pain you to speak of him?”

“It pains me to lie. I grieve his death,” she tells him, folds her hands together, presses them palm to palm and holds hard. “He was a brave man and a good one, and the world is lesser for the loss of him, and the burden heavier on the shoulders of Theoden King. He was a bright sword in battle, and a quiet drink after it, and he was… he was my friend and my heart’s delight and I grieve his death and I mourn with his people. But we were never for handfasting, he and I, and to let his father think I might have borne grandsons for his house is to add to their burden when it already lies so heavy. Mine is a little grief, shallow and selfish. Few men have looked at me and seen me as I am and desired me still, and few of those have been men to whom I might accede. And now I am orcmeat. My woman’s life is done.” She lifts a shoulder in dismissal and raises her eyes from her hands. “It is of little matter, among the great griefs of our age, that Berenel Denethor’s daughter longs for a lover’s touch to wipe away other horrors. Where have Legolas and Gimli gone?”

“Gimli is unconvinced that elves can quaff ale as well as he,” he tells her, and flashes the quick smile he seemingly holds in reserve for moments such as these. “Eomer and his horselords bore them away in great glee to put it to the test.”

“We must hope no orcs pour over the hills on the morrow,” she offers. “Must I go still swathed like a child?”

“For the night you may be freed of them,” he says, “and on the morrow we might let Legolas be the judge. Of us he has longest seen soldiers survive wounds or succumb to them.”

When he comes to her then and touches her upon the shoulder she turns easily into his hand, expecting only the nightly unwinding of her bandages and the daubing of salves whose smell she has learnt to hate, but he tips her chin up with his free hand and holding her still bends his head to kiss her on the brow, and says, eyes grave even as his mouth essays smiling words, “My lady, you might have any man you bend your gaze upon. All these Eorlingas straining at the bit like so many horses, which of them would not rush to your call?”

“Which of them would not call me a camp-whore, or expect a good word in Eomer’s ear, or to be made a lordling in Gondor? No, my captain, my king, I would not put out a hand for the horselords and betray the kindness this house has shown me. I would not do it even did they not think me Theodred’s betrothed.”

He dips his head further, lips brushing her ear, and says, “I am not a horselord, Berenel, to go begging for advancement. Will you have me?”

When she rears back it is only a step, his palm warm against her shoulder, and coarsely familiar through the thin cloth of her robe. It is summer in Rohan, or what passes as such in the whistling plains. Aragorn stares at her sober-eyed and unflinching across the handspan between them, his hand rising and falling with every breath shuddering through her. “I’ve met your lady,” she says. “You cannot be doing this for desire.”

“To ease the memory of the night I could not spare you I would do much.”

When he leans into her again, pressing her close, she raises her arms with some difficulty and winds them about his waist, presses her face to his throat and breathes him in tobacco and leather and the bright bitterness of metal worn next to skin. He held her on his lap riding away from the corpses, balanced on his thighs and braced against his chest with the scent of him blotting out the scent of blood, the reek of the orcs. Grishnakh bent over her, forcing his way into her body.

It is wrenching to unwind herself from him, to step back and then again. “Change my bandages and go,” she says. “I will have no-one for pity.”

“It is a long path,” he says, “between pity and desire.” But he takes her bandaged hand in his with no indication of pressing matters, and begins the long task of unwinding. The salve has sunk into her skin and turned it a pallid purple, and the starburst scars of arrows and the long violence of daggers rise livid through it. On her shoulder where he had set his hand a blade had gone through flesh and nicked bone. Her arm may never regain its earlier strength and sureness. When he shifts the robe from her shoulders and unbinds her breasts his hands are as impersonal as any to be found in Gondor’s Halls of Healing, kindly and distant, like all the touch she has had these many months since she rode from the White City into myth and peril. She might yet rue the day she would not take pity, but she has seen Arwen Undomiel, how like starlight she is, and the silence of nights in the high mountains. Like firelight herself, riding brand-bright into Rivendell, she might yet have dared him but not like broken embers, the detritus of forest fire. The path to pity is long as the blade of an orc’s dagger.

“They called me Fair,” she tells him when the bandages have been set aside and she is bared to the waist before him, hurting, “in the streets of the White City. They will need a new name.”

“Berenel the Valiant,” he murmurs, and takes up a washcloth dipped in the salve, darkly red, nearing black: tar-like in consistency. “Berenel Orc Slayer. Berenel who stood her ground and slew a pack of orcs to protect her own. Berenel who was taken and survived.”

The salve burns before soothing, fire and then ice. “You have been listening to the songs,” she says, “and singers lie often. Come, if you hasten you might yet have some part in the drinking.”

“You have lived,” he says, low-voiced that she hardly hears it, “and that truth will suffice. We will ask Legolas in the morning, but you might see a horse soon, and your weapons. Three days ago this day would have seen you collapse. Yet still you stand.”

“I have good healing flesh,” she tells him. “All do, in my family. My father in his first battle took an Orcish javelin through the thigh. He bears the scar of it still, a white thing like the web of some spider. I can feel my life only as it ebbs from me, Aragorn. You cannot ask it of me that I believe myself desired when I see the dread in your eyes as you gaze upon me, and the pain.”

“I’m no lad to rouse at the sight of skin or a bad enough healer to breach what has barely brought itself to health. Will you take no comfort of me?”

“As a healer might offer the sick?”

“As a friend might another. Refuse me and I will go, or you may sleep sister safe beside me if you need a body to guard you from the dark. Or do you want Legolas I will fetch him for you. He will not be the worse for drink unless the inns of Rohan store the well-aged wines of Mirkwood.”

“I have met your lady,” she says again, mustering her scattered wits. “I may be no great scholar as my brother is, but I know this of elves that they love but once. Then, too, I have heard Legolas call you Beren in the quiet deeps of a night when you thought us all asleep, in Moria before the goblins came.”

“I am not an elf, and not all things are for such love.” He puts away the washcloth again, wipes his hands on another and stoppers the vial of salve, clear half the room between them, and Berenel shivering with her longing for him, for the strength of him between her and the world, the kindness of his hands. “Will you let me sleep beside you as we have been accustomed, or must I cede to Legolas if you fear me now?”

“Pull my robe about my shoulders, or the serving maid will take a fright in the morning,” she tells him, and turns her back to his approach, pulls her arms up as he instructs and waits for him to retrieve the girdle and wind it below her breasts, away from her womb.

To lie beside him is simple comfort, easy from months of his eyes watching while the camp sleeps and of waking to keep him company over a banked fire and a smouldering pipe. In the dark with the lamps and the differences between them extinguished they are soldiers still, alone in a world half unknowing. In the dark she says to the fall of his hair, “Eowyn has taken to you like a moonstruck waif. Will you speak of Arwen to her, or ought Legolas and I?”

“She dreams of the glory of battle, and worships old soldiers. There is no harm in it and little intent. And there is nothing,” he adds, and turns on his elbow that she might see his face dimly as she lies on the flat of her back, “to tell her. Arwen is going with all her folk to the Undying Lands. It was a dream of love and cannot survive these dark times.”

“The Lady of Lorien gave a vial to Frodo of light,” she says. “In his greatest need, she said, in the darkest time there would be light. Have hope yet, that the dark times may turn.” She does not say to him, as she might at home, Gondor yet stands. He is a Ranger from the North, this king in her bed, a man from the West. Long have his fathers wandered from the encircling walls of the White City and far, and to speak to those who fled blasted Arnor of the walls of Gondor still standing smacks of an arrogance she has lost in Rivendell, in Moria, in Lorien, in the far-flung fields of Rohan and Isengard.

“My mother when she named me said she had given hope to the world and left none for herself. I was young when she died, no older than you when Finduilas did. It is a curse of our kind, to leave nothing for ourselves, and to find we can give nought to those dearest to us.”

She cannot fault him for wanting to offer comfort when her heart turns over at the bleakness in his voice, the wintry cold of it. She gropes carefully across the expanse of the bed and finds his shoulder, the nape of his neck, the curve of his skull and knots a hand in his hair. “She has not sailed yet. Some still remain of her people, on the shores of Middle Earth. You might yet win your way against Mordor, or Frodo destroy the Ring.”

“To be queen in Gondor is to subject herself to death, and she is young, yet, as elves are counted. Her uncle Elros is the forefather of our race, and the loss of him to mortality, and the loss of his sons and theirs and theirs has rankled these centuries in Elrond’s heart. All I can give Arwen is death, the throne of Gondor stands as no inducement to the Lady of Rivendell. She will go with her people, to the Undying Lands as her mother did before her. She and all her kin. The light of elfkind will go from Middle-Earth.”

“If the stars are gone, though the skies be emptier yet we will have the sun and moon still, those great lamps of day and night, if twilight is lost ever to us. Eowyn will make a good Queen, if you bend your eye to her. For mortal women the White City is a great prize, and you a greater one.”

When he laughs she can feel it reverbate bone through bone into her flesh. “Eowyn’s a child. It would be like taking a girl playing dolls and putting her in charge of a household. And, Lady, I am not king yet, your father holds Gondor. It needs no King, you have said in Rivendell in the court of fountains, and well I know the voice that taught you it.”

“Alas my poor father when you come to claim your throne, for what city, what people, would withstand you? They will line the streets to gaze upon you, strew the ground beneath your horse’s hooves with flowers. The silver trumpets will call out to the people.”

“They will say, the princes of Gondor have come home,” he says to her, as he said in the woods of Lothlorien, and takes her hand from his hair and brings it to his mouth, palm up, kisses the centre of it. “Do you think me a conqueror, when I seek only to succour you?”

“No,” she says, and leans closer and kisses him in lieu of the truth. He lies still against her, her hand clasped in his and pressed over his heart, his mouth open under hers and warm. His beard brushes her chin, scours it when she presses closer, and his eyes, so close in the dark, are swallowing dark. Nothing like Grishnakh and nothing like Theodred and nothing in truth like any man she has had. She falls back against the pillows and closes her eyes hard against the sparking dark. “I do not know what you want, or what pleasure you might find in it. I am trammelled with fear worse than any cloistered virgin, and battered as a camp-follower.”

He kisses her in answer, careful with her, his hands gentle on her uninjured arm, on the side of her face brushing hair away. His lips ghost over her forehead, the bridge of her nose, her cheek swollen where it had met the flat of a sword, the cleft of her chin. When he takes her mouth she sighs into the kiss, all of her unravelling, and presses deeper against the bedding. His body is balanced on elbows planted on either side of her and she can feel the tremor in his arm and the tension. “Do you fear me?”

“Did I so I would have cut your throat or mine,” she says, and kisses his hair. “You have held my life between your hands since I walked from Rivendell in your wake. I do not fear you, Lord.”

“You will tell me,” he instructs her collarbone, “when I do aught you dislike,” and presses his mouth to the hollow of her throat, and shifting his weight to an elbow loosens her girdle and opens her robe. His hand on her breast is a familiar surprise, the calluses rough against the curve of it, and his mouth, when he bend his head to her, a wet warmth around her nipple. She arches up into his touch, insistent, and he presses her firmly down again, his hands unyielding on shoulder and hip, his body crouched over hers and held apart by the length of his arms bent at the elbow. She sinks a hand again into his hair and pulls him closer till he is suckling like a babe, the tip of his tongue licking the tip of her nipple till it tightens and peaks. When it is unbearable pleasure she makes him relinquish his hold and offers him her other breast and gasps again as he sets his teeth to it in a brief bite and then noses down to kiss the tender skin between her breasts and beneath them. If Legolas has returned he might hear the quiet sounds they are making, but surely she would have heard Gimli crashing about, and surely they will not have drawn apart.

He draws himself back, further, and pulls her robe from her body so it lies about her in a puddle of cloth, and runs a hand over her side, too light for little but laughter, and looks to her with an appraising eye. She lets the laugh loose and gestures him away.

He laughs with her, delighted, and says, “You are as ticklish as a child,” and runs his hand light over her side again, and then more firmly, feeling his way over her many scars. She gasps again, and not with laughter, and groans when he runs his tongue down the line of an old scar cross-wise across her ribs. “Better.”

After that she is glad for his hands pinning her safe to the bed, for every touch of his mouth to callused skin makes her thrash about, writhe helpless within his grip, and moan. He maps the history of war inscribed on her with hands and mouth, and she thinks, if I could have him when I was well, and puts the thought aside. It is campfire comfort of a brand she has always been held too separate to take, and to bring thought of any future to it a betrayal of his kindnesses.

There is indeed little room for thought, and every thought dangerous for what crowds close beneath. She had lain flat on her back as she does now and convulsed as she does now and averted her eyes as she does now and if she closes her eyes even now she can see Grishnakh looming above her blotting out light and smell the acrid stench of uncured leather and old blood and feel her body tearing under his intrusion. No different than any Orcish blade tearing flesh, she had told herself then, but the deception has since crumbled like a shoddy wall. If she were a man she would have died. She ought have died. Better a clean death, with hero’s honours, better a good death than a mangled life. She has fallen like a vagabond on an offer of mercy and is devouring it whole with no thought of return. If her father knew of this he would cut her throat with little thought, or think it a better trick and commend her. More than memory or fear that thought brings her to herself. She puts a hand out to him and draws him up, warm along her side, and sets their heads together, brow to brow and hands clasped.

“We are soldiers together,” she tells him. “And this is comfort such as soldiers might share.”

She expects, not mockery from this man, but a moment of confusion, but Aragorn says simply, “No matter for Stewards or Kings,” and kisses her again, his lips brushing her hair and then the nape of her neck, the curve of her shoulder bare against the rich cloth of his shirt.

For the length of three breaths they lie still together, his hand in hers and his other arm sprawled over her body with the hand fitted to the curve of her belly, her shoulder tight against the sharp jut of his collar-bones. Then his hand moves in slow sweeps over the aching skin of her stomach, down from navel to pubis, and up till it brushes the shallow curves of her breasts, and down again brushing over her hips and between them, and lower yet to cup her pubis in his palm. This, too, is familiar touch, his hands have roamed every scrap of her skin and salved and bandaged and held together the breath and blood and bone of her. She parts her legs for him.

He shifts and settles infinitesimally till he is pressed hard against her, and presses a searching finger down to the apex of her folds and against the nub secreted within them, and holds hard until she is moving against his hand, hips twitching helplessly up. She can feel the bulk of him beside her, his breath stirring the tendrils of her hair, his erection hard against her hip, the patience in every line of him. “Do I hurt you,” he asks, and when she shakes her head adds, “do I please you?”

She pulls his hand upwards a fraction, and runs a finger lightly over it, and gasps when his grip eases in understanding. He strokes her flower-soft, his calluses catching her hood on each stroke, and presses a smile to her cheek when she shifts in his grip and begins to move with him. “You please me,” she says. and because years as a soldier and a lifetime as a princeling have left her coarsely uncaring for the pleasure of others above her own, adds, “I would I could have your fingers inside me, and your cock. I wish I could ride you. I would brace myself on your thighs and pin you to the bed with my body and you would let me take my pleasure of you. Would you let me have you, Aragorn?” 

He leans in and takes her mouth in the first show of desire she has seen in him, and his hand hastens between her folds, and he swallows her moans and kisses her harder. His body moves against hers, hips working, his erection obvious through the cloth of his breeches and rutting against her hip, her thigh. “My bright girl, my thing of fire,” he says, and kisses her throat, the line of her shoulder, the curve of her bicep, the lobe of her ear, all the parts and pieces of her he can most easily reach. Against his fingers her folds shudder and shivers and jolts of desire course through her. 

She says, laughing, turning her head to kiss him, glorying in the pleasure of his touch, of his body strong beside hers, of her body seeking joy, and his surging in response, “I would have you a hundred times over. Since Rivendell I have bent my eyes one you, for all you were beyond my touch, o my captain, my king.” She slams her mouth shut over it. Soldiers together, she had said. How quick the lie has fallen, and how easily, with her body rising to instinct and truth in his arms; how proud her father would be. “I did not intend,” she says, and falters again. He is not an easy man to lie to, and she not a woman to whom a lie comes easy, and every breath in her body, every beat of the blood in her is at his fingertips. She cannot think of him save as her king, for all promises.

“My lady of Gondor,” he whispers with his lips to her ear, his fingers lazy between her folds. “Lady of war; shield-maiden; Berenel the Valiant. I leap like an eager boy to your command, you may have of me what you will this night, should your wounds allow.”


End file.
